by Paige Clark
Stella and Eli were waiting when Rosa and Hannah arrived. Eli, who had done volunteer work at the hospital in his university days, was more at ease than Stella was at the home, with all of its safety regimens and medical apparel. No, Rosa corrected herself, he was more at ease everywhere. He reclined in a visitor’s chair, completing a crossword. His sleek hair was tucked behind one of his ears. Stella sat next to him, simultaneously glowering at the puzzle and scrutinising an individual grey hair between two fingers. Rosa could not see that it was a grey hair, of course, but she knew that was what her daughter was doing. She had, perhaps predictably, done the exact same thing herself when she was in those middle years. Rosa had never completed a crossword and neither, to her knowledge, had her daughter. But Eli was a wizard when it came to words. He was a human dictionary with first-rate hair.
‘I’m hoping this means you’re out of the woods, Mother,’ Stella said.
‘Hello, daughter. I didn’t know I was in the woods. I thought I was at Crescenta Valley Retirement Village.’
‘The temperature reports Renee sent through seem stable. Have you been feeling well?’
‘As good as a revolutionary and communist party leader.’ She made her Pol Pot faces and Eli doubled over in laughter. She applauded herself in her mind. Her practising had paid off.
‘What?’ Stella said.
‘I think she’s supposed to be Pol Pot,’ Eli said.
‘What the fuck?’
In reply, Rosa bared her dentures again and then grimaced, as she had in the mirror.
‘Be serious. It’s looking like you’ll be able to leave isolation this time next week.’
‘How are you, my beautiful Chinaman?’ Rosa asked. She batted her lashes at her son-in-law.
‘Pay attention, Mother. We’ll come back a few days after they’ve moved you back to your room to make sure you’re settled in.’
‘How many days is that?’ Rosa asked. It dawned on her that she was not a day younger than her age. Her breath was short. If Hannah appeared and asked her to walk away from the partition, she would fall down. Panic. Or anxiety. She could never keep them straight.
‘You forgot to put your rings on,’ Stella said.
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Yes, you did. Look, your hands are bare.’
And they were. She checked her earlobes, which were naked too. Had she put earrings on that morning or not? Next, she raised her hand to her collarbones to make sure her necklace was there—it was. ‘I miss you,’ she said to her daughter.
Her daughter replied, ‘It’s a beautiful necklace.’
‘You look lovely,’ Eli said and winked.
Rosa attempted to wink back, but her eyes were gloopy, so her bottom and top lashes stuck together. The gesture ended up being a hard blink, as if Rosa were trying to stay awake.
‘We’ll let you rest now, Mum,’ Stella said. Rosa relished that soft name coming from her daughter’s mouth. How tender the shape of a word could be! Stella and Eli stood up and drifted away from Rosa to the elevator. Eli put his arm around Stella’s waist. She buried her head in his shoulder and Eli stroked Stella’s head of old hairs. They are still in the throes of love, Rosa thought, or at the very least they are still fond of each other. It is too much sometimes, she knew, to ask even for that. Then Rosa thought she could hear weeping. Maybe it was her own. She put the big knuckle of her index finger to her bottom eyelid to stop her tears, but her eyes were dry, bar the crust of sleep. Had the forecast said rain? No, and it had been a fine day when she’d spotted Lucy out in the parking lot. If she wasn’t crying, who was?
By the time Rosa realised her mistake, her daughter had disappeared into the elevator. Rosa climbed onto her chair and then onto the table and then attempted to mount the plastic barrier that stood between her and the elevator. She managed to swing one leg over, hoist herself up and balance on the divider, but lost her nerve before jumping down. She squinted to see if she could make out what floor the elevator was on, but her eyesight, like everything else, was going. Below her, guards, who looked more like soldiers, paced. They spoke into their handsets without any comedy in their voices, without any pity in their souls.
Hannah and Renee arrived to find Rosa like this, balanced atop the partition as if riding an invisible gymnast’s horse. Now Rosa was the one who was weeping.
‘You’re lucky we know how to get you out of a pickle,’ Hannah said.
Renee said nothing, but there was kindness in her touch as she guided Rosa off the barrier and carried her out of the room. How strong Renee was! How good she smelt—like amaretto liqueur and washing-up liquid! And then there was smiling Hannah too, with her suit of sweet teddies and the constellation of freckles across her forehead.
Stella would be furious. And more furious still when she remembered the visit—her mother screwing up her face and relaxing it again, over and over, as if making a joke that her daughter couldn’t translate, as if Rosa were making a joke of her very own life.
That evening, Renee walked into the isolation room carrying a decorative fruit bowl filled with mashed potatoes and a ceramic pitcher of gravy. Even with her bad eyes, Rosa could see the specks of crunchy pork a float in the rendered drippings. Curls of rosemary, swimming in the fat that pooled on the surface, winked kindly at her. Renee poured the gravy onto the mound of potatoes in the shape of a smiley face and handed Rosa a spoon.
‘You told me not to play with my food,’ Rosa said.
‘I’m breaking the rules today,’ Renee said.
‘You told me not to trust anyone who breaks the rules.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
Rosa took a mounded spoonful of mashed potatoes. Hadn’t Renee said it on their walk to isolation? Or was it on the walk to the visiting room? She licked the gravy off the spoon. It was the first real food she had eaten in years.
‘I accidentally ordered too many potatoes for the kitchen,’ Renee said. ‘The chef might not ever forgive me.’
‘I might never forget this,’ Rosa said. Yet somehow the gift of potato felt ominous, as if she were being served her last meal. ‘Is everything okay out there, Renee?’
Renee said, ‘Marianne’s been moved to intensive care.’
Rosa realised that Marianne was one of the twins. If she had ever bothered to learn their names, she had long since forgotten them. It wasn’t on purpose. It was just a chore to get to know people. Oh, Marianne! She’d had a hard life. Or she hadn’t. Marianne with the two grandbabies who made her ugly collages that hung proudly above her bed. Or Marianne with nobody to come to visit and some horrible secret. A car crash? Or was it abuse? Maybe both. Rosa could count her blessings, really. How pristine she’d been, once upon a time. If not for that incident with her father when she was a child. But she had wished that away years ago. Her husbands—melded in her mind like twins—hadn’t been cruel. They had simply concerned themselves more with the lives of other men than with her. Had not cared to see her in as much clarity as she would have liked to be seen. She forgave them all!
Renee sniffed, holding back a tear.
‘There, there,’ Rosa said. The consolation was perfunctory. The loss of Marianne was not acute enough to stir up any real feeling in her.
‘I’m silly,’ Renee said, and Rosa understood that she loathed to be seen like this.
‘We’re all silly sometimes,’ Rosa said.
Then Rosa was with her twins again. They were all at their usual table. The twins were playing gin rummy. Rosa finished her entire book of word searches. The last word she circled was ‘everlasting’. Everyone had double servings of Scotch Fingers. Hannah brought tea straight from the urn. Even with milk, the first sip scalded Rosa’s mouth. They were served a meal of the finest mashed potato and pork crackling. She and the twins flew all the way to San Francisco. They made good time but their arms were tired after the flight. International travel was still legal, still glamorous. They all wore their hair out, never mind the wind.
‘I’ll kee
p you posted,’ Renee said and left the room. Rosa remembered seeing her in the parking lot. She’d worn a thick gold cross around her neck. Looked beautiful even with her hair done up in a net. Even looking like that. Too much like Rosa. Too much like someone not from here. At least, that’s what they used to say. Had they said it to her daughter too? Perhaps if they had, Stella would better understand the music, the fluency Rosa had with Eli, in all of his foreign glory. In all of his foreign shame!
By the time Rosa made it out of isolation, the twins as she knew them were dead. Rosa was sitting down to her Friday meal of fish when she saw the remaining one alone. Hannah wheeled her out to their usual table.
‘Try and eat something, Penny,’ Hannah said. That was how Rosa learnt her name.
Rosa was trying to eat something too, though shellfish was her culinary Mount Everest. As a young woman, she had feigned an allergy to avoid eating the grotesque bugs. They were just giant beetles if you thought about it for too long. Fish was fine as long as it tasted like chicken. She dreaded the end of the week and wondered why the habit of serving seafood on Fridays hadn’t gone out of fashion with Catholicism.
‘Sorry to hear,’ Rosa said.
‘She talked a hell of a lot,’ Penny said. ‘Enough for two damn people.’
Penny wasn’t bereaved enough to leave any steamed cod in a garlic lemon butter sauce, wilted broccolini or strawberry mousse untouched. Rosa pushed her dessert towards Penny, who accepted the offering. Rosa managed to choke down a few bites of the fish, the garlic butter sauce viscous and throat-coating. It was the kind of sauce that stayed with you. Lucy came to clear the remnants of the meal. She made googly eyes at Rosa and then at Penny. Rosa knew Lucy was sticking out her tongue at both of them behind her mask. The giveaway was the wet spot. Rosa stuck out her tongue in reply. Lucy made her hands into moose antlers on her head and wiggled her fingers. Rosa noticed that her gloves bunched up around her knuckles. She was wearing rings today. A shame she had such skinny, witchy fingers.
‘God, she’s a piece of shit,’ Penny said when Lucy left.
Rosa had never heard the twins talk like that. In fact, she was beginning to suspect she’d never heard Penny speak at all. She wished for her book of word searches to keep her busy, to keep away the quiet of death that dined at the table with them. Penny seemed content to stew in her own silence. Was it a kind act or a cruel one to let Marianne do the talking for her? Or had she just been rolled over to their usual table, parked there and left to rot?
‘She’s a character!’ Rosa said.
‘She’s a bitch,’ Penny said. ‘But she looks good in your earrings.’ ‘No, they’re not my earrings,’ Rosa heard herself say. But then where were her earrings?
‘You forgot to put rings on,’ Stella had said.
Rosa resisted the urge to touch her ears at the table, to double-check in Penny’s presence for evidence of Lucy’s alleged crime. Though she did shake her head lightly to test for the weight of the gold hoops she usually wore. No, they were not there. She had not put them on this morning or the morning before that. She looked at her hands, naked, and folded them on top of one another so Penny could not accuse her of naivety again. Surely not Lucy! Surely Rosa. Rosa was prone to misplacing things, her mind drilled with holes, her memory Swiss cheese. Rosa was ineffective—wasn’t that what Stella used to call her when she raised her hands in a loose fist to her husband? It was that Rosa who had misplaced her jewels. That Rosa, with burns on her knees from where she fell to the carpet, pleading with her daughter to be taken seriously, a mouth full of grey shag. It was that Rosa who lost and took and let things slip from her grasp—the car, the names of the twins, the silhouette of her own earring. The tone of the gold as it clinked on the glass of her isolation window. Twenty-four carats. She could remember that. Oh, that Rosa had lost sentimental things too. She’d been stripped of the most private parts of herself. A girlhood. The whole charade that a woman could ever belong to herself.
Rosa stood up and moved away from the table, leaving Penny alone to sip her tea. She walked out of the dining room and brushed past Hannah, her arms cradling a tub of used cutlery. It must be Hannah. It was her suit, decorated with good-natured extraterrestrials eating different-coloured popsicles. Rosa gulped. She regretted giving the cod a chance to linger by donating her dessert. She did not speak to Hannah, but picked up her pace and headed towards her room.
At the doorway, Rosa paused and took inventory. Everything appeared to be as it should be. How should it be? She headed to her vanity and sat down in front of the mirror. She made a few faces at herself—scrunching her nose, opening her eyes wide and unblinking—before she pulled out her jewellery box. The box was oriental in design, carved out of camphorwood and fitted with a brass latch. Her father had given it to her when she was a teenager. Undoing the latch, Rosa felt both terror and ecstasy rising in her throat. Because this was what she had learnt in her long life—that doing wrong and having wrong done to you are flipsides of the same coin.
She was not surprised when the box was empty, all but for a fortune cookie paper she’d kept—You think it’s a secret, but they know, it read—and her father’s cufflinks. Even the freshwater pearls were gone. If she had a window in her bedroom, she might have seen Lucy driving past at that moment, dizzy, terrified and high. But she did not need a window to recognise the woman Lucy was. She looked at herself in the mirror again. What was it that she was expecting to find? What was it that she thought she deserved? She had the cufflinks left for her daughter. Eli could pull them off. It was not as if her drab daughter had any interest in her jewellery. When her daughter turned sixteen, Rosa had begged her to get her ears pierced and Stella had refused. She’d been truly nasty that day, calling Rosa a blow-up doll made for a man’s pleasure. Rosa fished out the fortune from the bottom of the jewellery box, fumbled to rip it into small pieces and threw them in the bin. He was dead anyway. If she closed her eyes, she could hear the midi organ, the synthetic strings, the electronic pulse that wished him away for good.
Rosa closed the box. She walked into the corridor, then past the dining room. All of the lights were off. Penny was still sitting at their usual table, where she’d been forgotten. She screamed for help but nobody came.
Perhaps Rosa would have turned back to help her if Hannah had not rushed by, almost knocking Rosa over. Renee, in a full sprint, came next. Or perhaps Rosa would have continued on, as she did now, past the dining room and towards reception. Nobody was at the desk. She walked up to the two buttons that let visitors in and out. This was a puzzle to her old brain. She heard footsteps behind her and jammed one of the buttons down. The first door opened and she walked through. She thought she heard someone screaming her name. Who could it be? It could be anyone. All her life, that had been the way people said her name. Never with tenderness. Why not with tenderness? The second door opened and Rosa was free.
It was too dark for her to see. Outside for the first time in god knows how long, she knew it was summer, the slice of summer where even at night it is still hot enough to take your breath away. She knew that from here on out everything would feel the same as what she’d felt before. The wind blew her hair loose. She stepped back out onto California Street. She put the car into drive.
As soon as Renee reached Penny, she realised her mistake. She had been running hard, but she wasn’t out of breath. She had been practising for this somehow. Without giving any instruction to Hannah, she turned back and made it to reception in time to see Rosa slip past the first security door.
Renee called out Rosa’s name, but she did not ask Rosa to stop. She would not ask that of her. The incident at Renee’s previous job had not been her fault, the committee had decided. Renee’d had no symptoms, no way of knowing she was sick. All of those outstanding people! She’d cherished every one of them, no matter what age they were. Oh, their wrinkly faces, all folds of skin and whiskers and no teeth. She’d washed their bodies, getting every crevice sparkling clean. Oh, their sm
ells! No amount of marzipan perfume could cover up that scent of slow rot. She missed them all. There she was the day she had to face the committee, fiddling with the cross necklace her mother insisted she wear. She heard the ruling and then asked, please, to be punished.
Renee ran to the reception desk but paused before pressing the emergency button. Rosa made it past the second door. No point chasing after her. She would not have long out there. Renee watched on as Rosa’s hair came undone in the wind. Funny, she thought, how Rosa hadn’t ever cut it short. Then she lost her to the night. Only one thing left to do. It would not change anything, Renee knew. It never changed anything. But there, in the speckled light of the reception cubicle, she got down on her knees anyway.
And she prayed.
DEAD SUMMER
The year my mother dies, my boyfriend catches me jumping out of the window of our house. It only has one storey. He stands in the yard with his arms folded across his chest and one eyebrow raised. ‘I knew you were going to do that,’ he says.
‘I am practising,’ I say.
‘For what?’ he says. ‘You’re too afraid to die.’
I’ve landed barefoot, in my old gym T-shirt from junior high school and cotton underpants. It is dusk in the dead of summer and the grass is dewy from the sprinklers. It is my mother’s kind of weather—the relief of night from a hot day—and I can’t stomach it. I go inside and turn the air conditioner to high and sit on my bed trembling.
I am afraid of many things—getting pinkeye, crossing the street outside of a crosswalk, overly aggressive panhandlers, dangerous amphibians. And I was once afraid of life coming to an end—of what I imagined would be a sputtering, spitting last gasp for air. But my mother’s body deflated like a day-old balloon and I held her hands as they changed temperature. My boyfriend went to the hospital lobby to buy her flowers and all I could think was, Hurry up, it’s getting cold, like she was a bowl of soup.